If you had to guess the whereabouts of a mid-20th-century scholar in the grip of Elizabethan England, afire with excitement at those restless but shadowy minds, it would be remarkable if you picked Ankara.

There wasn't a yeoman's cottage within a thousand miles of Orhan Burian's room at the Turkish capital's university in the 1940s and 50s. No woodsmoke drifted from manorial chimneys to interrupt his view of the Anatolian plain. But the books on his shelves were as full of Gloriana as any galleon of Drake's. There was Spenser's Fairie Queene and the works of Thomas Goffe, whose plays The Raging Turke and The Couragious Turke were Burian's specialities. And look: under a letter to a young woman student translating Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse with his encouragement, isn't that Richard Knolles's The Generall Historie of the Turkes?

What flair that old man had, Burian mused in Osmanli Arastirmalari, the Journal of Ottoman Studies. How vividly, from his schoolmaster's house in Sandwich in the late 16th century (the General Historie first appeared in 1603), Knolles described the empire whose people were the enemies of his faith. Three hundred and fifty years later Burian wrote: "He seems, true Elizabethan that he was, fascinated by the possibilities of his subject: the rise of a small nation, in 300 years, to the heights of an empire without a rival in power and glory."

As the salvage teams work through the debris of the British consulate and HSBC bank in Istanbul, it is good to be reminded of these criss-crossing threads of intellectual curiosity - and to learn that the English-Turkish connection arising from the Generall Historie is set to be revived, courtesy of the rescue by another Turkish scholar of an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of Richard Knolles's work.

The new book, Richard Knolles' History of the Turks, which languished as a typewritten manuscript for 50 years, is the legacy of a much-liked, modest academic at London university's School of Oriental and African Studies, Vernon Parry, who was famous for his lectures given in a Welsh lilt with his forelock flopping over his eyes. He died in 1974, aged 59, but not before he had shepherded many future scholars through courses on the history of Turkey.

He was known in a vague way to have done work on Knolles, and his closer friends were aware that he had prepared a PhD thesis on the Generall Historie but never submitted it. When his wife Lydia died five years ago, her family found the typescript.

Salih Ozbaran, who had been Parry's student, was in Cambridge when he received an invitation to see the bundle of papers. In his introduction to Richard Knolles's History of the Turks, which Ozbaran has edited and seen through to publication (in English), he describes the moment of rediscovery as "wonderful" and concludes that nothing done on Knolles equals Parry's work.

The shifting fate of the Generall Historie has been an indicator of the health of the "Elizabethan" spirit - curiosity, energy and willingness to learn from the other - in both Turkey and Britain since its first publication. The Ottomans of the time could not have been more grandly uninterested. To their cultured elite, Europe was the home of primitives.

Virtually none of the learning of the Renaissance was translated in Istanbul; in medicine, the only exception until the late 18th century was a collection of European studies of syphilis, the "Frankish pox", presented to Sultan Mehmed IV in 1655. Rare diplomatic letters to Elizabeth's court patronised her as Kiralice (Queenlet) of the Vilayet, or province, of England, much as the British Raj in its turn was to treat "native" princelings. There was a half-hearted interest in getting Leonardo da Vinci to bridge the Bosphorus, but the Sublime Porte, as the Ottoman court was known, overall was complacent.

In London by contrast, the spirit of inquiry exemplified by Knolles - a struggling and sickly Oxford graduate constantly distracted by running Sandwich Free School - was on fire. The Generall Historie was a bestseller at a time more usually remembered for domestic struggles, from Guy Fawkes to the glorious revolution via the civil war. From Ankara, Orhan Burian traced a spate of editions throughout the 17th century. Knolles saw two to the printers before he died in 1610. The market was still strong enough in 1700 for a "new and enlarged edition", followed by a cheap abridgement the following year.

But the British in their turn were to lose their intellectual edge with regard to Turkey, as the explorations begun by Raleigh and Drake drew attention further afield. The Ottomans came to represent decline and Knolles's reputation sank with them. In the comment by which he is now most widely remembered in Britain, Knolles was pitied by Samuel Johnson in "The Rambler" of May 1751 as a man whose genius was "wasted upon a foreign and uninteresting subject, recounting enterprises and revolutions of which none desire to be informed".

Johnson's admiration for Knolles's research and style is usually omitted when this quotation is used, but the great doctor came uncannily close to the insularity shown earlier by the Turks. He explained: "Nothing could have sunk this author in obscurity, but the remoteness and barbarity of the people whose story he relates." Two-and-a-half centuries later, it is time to rediscover Knolles and the Turks' long-standing interest in him; as he wrote of his own subject, it is "a story most admirable and strange".

· Richard Knolles's History of the Turks by Vernon J Parry is published by the Economic and Social Foundation of Turkey, www.tarihvakfi.org.tr

· Professor William Hale gives an open inaugural lecture on "Islamism and Democracy; the Turkish Case" at SOAS on December 3, at 5.30pm. www.soas.ac.uk